Sauna

i’ve always wanted a home sauna, but not having a lot of construction experience i was worried about doing it all myself. so i ordered an outdoor sauna kit via cedarbrook sauna around memorial day ‘24. they quoted me 2-4 months lead time from the order, plenty of time to get to work on the base.

staking out location

the foundation in place, a month left in the original lead time window it was a waiting game for the ordered kit to arrive. but as the lead time slipped from month four.. to five.. to six, i was getting nervous. communication from the vendor wasn’t the greatest. but eventually, a week before thanksgiving, it arrived!

the pallet was so large, they needed two trucks in order to lower it down

then it sat in my garage for a couple of weeks until time and weather aligned for the construction stages. my cat lulu helped supervise.

my friend rob helped me put the walls together and let me borrow his ladder to put the roof on. he’s a legend. the night we started was so windy, the wall sections acted as sails. we’d align one and then i’d stand there to buffer it against the wind while rob grabbed the next section. with three sections in place (1 1/2 sides) it was finally heavy enough to withstand the gusts of wind. we put all eight walls plus the ceiling in place and called it a night.

the next day, we started assembling the roof. thankfully, there was much less wind.

trusses in place, roof boards attached, tar paper down, metal sheeting screwed in.

later i also attached a gutter to the backside, it drains down into a nearby garden bed

with the building dried in, it was time to assemble the benches and prepare for the electrician

to run electric, i needed to dig a trench about 45 feet, about eight feet through concrete.

the electrical panel is right on the other side of this wall

i rented a trencher, concrete saw and demo hammer from home depot and got to work.

the concrete saw didn’t work super well so i switched to just the demo hammer. it worked a lot better.

once the conduit to the sauna and hot tub were in, it was time to fill in the trench and patch the concrete

with some “temporary” pavers to avoid the mud

mini-completion

i have since covered the front opening, added a second row of pavers and attached a gutter to the backside.

overall, nearly a year later (~10 months of use), i’m pretty happy with it but if i were to do it again, i would just build from scratch entirely. i was not super impressed with the quality of the kit or the directions. there was a lot of needless back and forth with the vendor because some wood was missing, the roof was cut to the wrong size, etc. for the cost of the kit i would expect things to be a little bit more polished.. but plenty needed to be cut to size on site anyways. save some money and do it all yourself, even if it takes a little bit longer to source materials and cut things to size. all in all, still gets a ton of use. at least once a week, usually two or three times.

it feels great.